Why are console windows limited to Lucida Console and raster fonts?

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re: Why are console windows limited to Lucida Console and raster fonts?

Romulo A. Ceccon — Fri, 25 May 2007 16:50:28 GMT

I guess people who bother with the console font would bother with the console window in the first place. I asked myself for a long time why it's so ugly and doesn't follow the themes in Windows XP.

I got a partial answer from Mark's book, Windows Internals. The drawing of console windows is one of the few pieces of the Windows subsystem that runs in user-mode. Non-console windows are drawn entirely in kernel mode.

I'd love to see my console windows look like all others, however. Looks like that has been solved in Vista.

re: Why are console windows limited to Lucida Console and raster fonts?

David Conrad — Sat, 19 May 2007 02:27:19 GMT

My first thought was, although it would have been too slow in 95, redraw the entire window every time a character is changed.

After reading through the comments, I think a better solution would be, recommend bitmapped or Lucida Console fonts, but if another font is chosen, autodetect whether it contains characters with overhangs (which, as was pointed out, should be possible).

If it does have overhangs, then switch on a mode where when any character is changed, redraw not only its cell but the cells of all the characters around it.

The console window would then not perform as well with some fonts, but it would look good with all of them, and anyone could get the full performance by sticking to the recommended fonts. A big project, I'll admit.

Thanks, Raymond, for the link to that KB article, and thanks to the commenters who pointed out Consolas, which I was unaware of.

re: Why are console windows limited to Lucida Console and raster fonts?

chuck — Sat, 19 May 2007 00:52:16 GMT

PuTTY is a truly awesome product, no two ways about it. I've heard of various hacks to turn it into a generic terminal emulator connected to a local process instead of a connection, but it seems to be a pretty involved. Have you considered building support for such a mode into the main PuTTY distribution?

Right now I use cygwin rxvt, which is okay, but it has no unicode support :(

Working around this in PuTTY

Simon Tatham — Fri, 18 May 2007 20:43:23 GMT

A couple of people have mentioned above that PuTTY permits the use of any monospaced font, and yet doesn't suffer from character droppings. I thought I'd post the reason why not, in case anyone's interested.

The reason why PuTTY doesn't suffer from droppings is because I devised a redraw policy which is proof against it. When drawing text in the console window, we always clip it to its theoretical containing rectangle, and then we remember that we drew that rectangle as a single unit and hence that the character cells within it may overlap each other. So the next time we draw anything that overlaps that rectangle, we make sure we redraw the entire rectangle, never only half of it.

So you'll still occasionally see edges being chopped off characters which extend beyond their character cells, but not too much: within any string of text that was displayed in one go, the characters should look normal. And you should never see a dropping being left behind after its associated character has gone.

re: Why are console windows limited to Lucida Console and raster fonts?

KJK::Hyperion — Fri, 18 May 2007 16:30:50 GMT

Colas: that's not the point. The Windows console was designed to emulate VGA text mode in a window, so it expects to print characters as fixed-size cells of pixels, not as strings of typographic glyphs

re: Why are console windows limited to Lucida Console and raster fonts?

Norman Diamond — Fri, 18 May 2007 03:15:18 GMT

Thursday, May 17, 2007 8:21 AM by ender

> 8x8 character cell size is used for 80x50

> text, 8x14 for 80x30 (rarely seen on VGA

> displays, though the same size was used for

> 80x25 on EGA), and 8x16 is used for 80x25

> text mode.

OK, I believe you. Nonetheless the screen displays 16x16 in text mode, and the font comes from file BOOTFONT.BIN in the root of the system partition (in NT4, 2000, XP, and 2003). You can observe this by having NTLDR and/or NTDETECT.COM come from a different language version than BOOTFONT.BIN.

> If you remember the EGA.CPI file from

> DOS/Win9x, it was used to change the look of

> these glyphs.

I didn't notice EGA.CPI in Windows 9x but I'll take your word for it that it was involved. So it yielded 16x16 glyphs that weren't restricted to a subset of foreign characters. Fine, it did the same as BOOTFONT.BIN.

re: Why are console windows limited to Lucida Console and raster fonts?

Kjartan Þór — Fri, 18 May 2007 02:45:48 GMT

Steve: This works fine on my machine running Vista, no problem entering fullscreen mode for cmd or powershell